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RICHMOND
BALTIMORE 281
Capitol Square as it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century is shown in
figure 195. In the left foreground is the bell tower, constructed in 1824,
which still stands. Beyond and to the right of it can be seen the monument
to George Washington completed in 1858, surrounded by smaller statues
of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Andrew Lewis,
Thomas Nelson, and John Marshall. Behind the Capitol appears Gode-
froy's attractive and unusual domed city hall, which he designed at the
time he was laying out the square and preparing plans for the reconstruc-
tion of the Capitol. This fine building and the adjacent First Presbyterian
Church were pulled down in 1879 to make way for the present city hall. The
Capitol itself can be seen with the odd entrance stairs on its western side.
Those in our view replaced the original curving pair of entrance stairs
sometime in the 18305. It was not until 1906 that the broad steps now
leading up the hill to the south portico were added. That project included
the addition of a wing on each side of the original building that, while not
unattractive, altered substantially the appearance of Jefferson's original
design.
The city in its formative years in the first part of the nineteenth century
presented an impressive appearance. The view in figure 196 from one of
its western hills in 1834 is but one of many that attracted topographic artists
of the period. The Capitol and, beyond it, Godefroy's city hall, dominated
the landscape, along with Latrobe's penitentiary to the left, built between
1797 and 1800. Only the great public buildings of the national capital
could rival this fine civic composition. The opportunity to add harmonious
structures around Capitol Square as they might be needed from time to
time without interfering with its fine prospect from nearly every direction
was, however, ignored. Following the Civil War and throughout the
present century thoughtless additions of buildings in and encroachments to
Capitol Square have seriously detracted from its beauty.27 Equally dis-
astrous, tall office and business buildings in the lower portions of the town
have now almost completely obliterated distant views of the Capitol.
Jefferson's stated intention "to improve the taste of my countrymen, to
increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and
procure them it's praise" by the construction of his noble Capitol on its
splendid hilltop site proved persuasive to his contemporaries. Those who
followed forgot his wise counsel and, as he feared for the Capitol itself if his
design were not followed, the square and its surroundings come dangerously
close to being "a monument of our barbarism which will be loaded with
execrations as long as it shall endure."
Among the several dozen new towns planned in Maryland in the eigh-
teenth century, one ultimately achieved remarkable success. In fact,
Baltimore became the dominant city of the entire Chesapeake Bay, its rate of
growth after the Revolution unsurpassed by any major American com-
munity. The most northerly of the southern cities and the most southerly
of those of the North — a city with its own distinctive character — Baltimore
by 1790 ranked as the fifth largest city in the United States. A certain
historic justice attaches to the fact that it bore the name of a family so
intimately associated with the settlement of the tidewater region and with
the repeated attempts, so often thwarted, to achieve an urban basis of
colonial life.
Its beginnings did not distinguish Baltimore from the other towns of
eighteenth-century Maryland and Virginia. Around the mouth of the
Patapsco River on the western side of Chesapeake Bay near its northern
end a few settlers had established their plantations. In 1706 this seemed
like an advantageous spot for a town, and the act of that year creating
a number of such sites designated a point of land separating the two
branches of the Patapsco for that purpose. The Whetstone Point settlement
does not seem to have been successful, and it was not until 1729 that
further efforts were made. In that year Daniel Carroll and his brother
Charles, along with several other inhabitants of the area, petitioned the
assembly to establish a town on the land owned by the two Carrolls.28
The exact site was a subject of some disagreement. An earlier proposal
to place the town on land owned by John Moale on the south branch of the
Patapsco was rejected following Moale's objections at Annapolis where he
sat as a member of the assembly. The Carroll tract, known then as Cole's
Harbor, was on the other side of the peninsula of which Whetstone Point
was the tip. The water offshore here was not as deep, the area included
swamps and marshes, and the site was hemmed in to the north and east by
a creek that wound its way from Jones Falls upstream into the harbor area.
Nevertheless, the location seemed as suitable as many chosen previously for
the numerous small ports and trading communities already in existence.
The topography of the area and the site chosen for the town is clearly
shown on the 1781 map in figure 197. This drawing also shows the location
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